[人工智能]如何写好Response letter

Response letter的主要目的是回复你采纳了审稿人哪些有助于提高论文质量的意见，并表明做出了哪些修改。所以这意味着不必同意审稿人所有建议的更改，但是你需要知道如何以适当的方式说明为什么拒绝修改。本文给大家分享如何有效地写好一封Response letter。

第一个部分：General Response
除了开头要提到的基本信息（如编辑姓名，期刊名字，论文标题，Manuscript ID）之外，这个部分还需要总的表达一下对编辑和审稿人的感谢，表示已经解决了审稿人提出来的所有问题与建议，并表明下文回复审稿人意见的格式（加粗/斜体/字体颜色）。在感谢部分要注意的是，尽量不要说例如“Thank you for your comments, which have helped us to substantially/greatly improve the manuscript.” 的话，评论稿件质量是审稿人的工作，不要冒昧地夸赞自己做出的修改。

We appreciate all of the valuable comments from the reviewers of our work. We have revised our manuscript, according to the reviewers’ comments, questions, and suggestions.

We highly appreciate the reviewers for their insightful comments and criticism, which have helped us improve both the content and the presentation of our work. We believe that the revised version of our paper addresses all concerns by the referees in detail.

We greatly appreciate the thorough and thoughtful comments provided on our submitted article. We made sure that each one of the reviewer comments has been addressed carefully and the paper is revised accordingly.

In what follows the referees’ comments are in black and the authors’ responses are in red.

We have incorporated most of the suggestions made by the reviewers. Those changes are highlighted within the manuscript.[修改的部分高亮] Please see below, in blue, for a point-by-point response to the reviewers’ comments and concerns. [回复的部分用蓝色字体]

如果根据审稿人的意见，你有对稿件进行大的修改，不妨用一个简洁的段落总结一下所做的主要更改以及它们是否会影响你对研究结果的原始解释。

We made three notable changes to the manuscript,…

第二个部分：Point-to-Point Response
在这个部分里，一个清晰的格式和排版非常重要。让编辑看得省心，你的论文才能省心地顺利发表。首先要将段落式的评审意见拆成点列式，然后编号逐点回复，推荐以下这个格式。

Responses to the comments of Reviewer #1

[Comment]

Response: …

[具体修改的内容]

[Comment]

Response: …

Responses to the comments of Reviewer #2
…

具体回复的时候要做到礼貌尊重，理据充分，逐点回复，清晰明了

礼貌尊重：所有的审稿人都花费了一定时间精力来评估你的工作，即使有些意见可能不是那么正面，但也不是针对个人，只是为了给你的工作带来附加价值，当你遇到不合理的意见和要求时，语气还是应该保持平和。在某些情况下，你可能会认为审稿人是竞争对手，他用别有用心的理由来延迟稿件。在这种情况下，不应在回复中直接面对审稿人，而应在另一封信中将您的疑虑传达给编辑。

理据充分：无论是同意还是拒绝做出审稿人建议的更改，一定要有理有据，一般来说可以结合论文的研究实际，实验条件，或者引用一些文献来回应审稿人的顾虑。

逐点回复：这意味着不能把审稿人的意见搪塞过去，要认真读清楚审稿人的建议，一定要确认编辑和审稿人提出的所有意见都有回复到。而且要分别回应每个审稿人，不要用“请参阅我们对第2个审稿人的评论xx的回答”来回应另一位审稿人。

清晰明了：除了大量修改后的文本太长而无法引用，尽可能地把修改的具体内容在response letter里面提出来，让审稿人或编辑不必阅读稿件即可找到所做的更改。并应该说明这些修改的位置(i.e., page number, paragraph, and/or line)，但应确保指定是引用原始手稿还是修订稿中的位置。

那么如何去具体地回复批评或意见呢？下面列了几种常见的情况供大家参考。
值得注意的是，Response letter是发给编辑看的，虽然其他审稿人也能看见你的Peer Review File，但还是应该在回复的过程中使用第三人称提及审稿人，如“We agree with the reviewer”而不是“We agree with You”。

增加数据/图表

We have added a comment in the section “…” to point out the…
we have inserted two new figures to provide clear illustration of…

增加引用（如果有要求，尽量都要增加）

We added the two references and commented on them in Section 6.2.4 and Section 6.5.
These references have been added and discussed in the paper – Sections 6.2.4 and 6.5.1

语言问题

The paper is checked again to improve its Grammar.
The said sentence is rephrased to make the sentence easy to understand

审稿人提出了类似的意见

如果有多个注释建议进行类似的修订，例如特定的语法错误或更改关键术语，则可以对所有此类注释提供一般性答复。例如：
We have corrected the grammatical issues pointed out in the manuscript and accompanying figures and tables;
The suggested key terms have been used throughout the manuscript.

提出的问题其实已经在原稿中提到过

在这里你可以选择满足审稿人的要求，简单地以不同表达在稿件的其他部分重复这些信息:
We mentioned there were 45 samples in total in the Methods (page 6, line 4), but we have now also added the following to the start of the Results section to avoid any potential confusion: ‘Of the 45 samples tested, 9…’ (page 8, lines 19-20).

There were 15 samples in each of the 3 groups (Methods, page 3, line 20). We have reworded the text to state the total of 45 samples explicitly.

The total sample number was 45, as mentioned in Table 1. We have now added this to the main text for clarity (Procedure, page 3, line 7).

We have mentioned the limitations in the paper. To reiterate(重复一下), …

不同审稿人的意见有冲突时

在回复编辑处：
[提出冲突的地方]Reviewer 1 suggests that…,Reviewer 2, on the other hand, would like to see…
[提出你的看法]We considered…,so we are eager to know your perspective on the matter.
[两个版本都可以提供] In fact, we tried the revisions that way at first and would be happy to send that version along as well if it might be helpful.

审稿人觉得你的研究没有创新性

While we appreciate the reviewer’s feedback, we respectfully disagree. We think this study makes a valuable contribution to the field because [描述您的研究或其结果所获得的知识、提供的见解、回答的问题等].

需要拒绝审稿人的建议/无法增做实验

拒绝之前，请首先考虑一下 1.审稿人的评论是否暗示您对工作的解释不够清楚？2.评论是否涉及您之前未曾考虑过的重要观点或观点？3.满足要求以便通过同行评审仅需要相对较小的更改，而不会影响您的论文结果或声誉？如果回答是的话，请老老实实地按要求修改吧~

对于增加实验，你可以揣摩审稿人的态度的强硬，并考虑其他审稿人的好评程度，编辑的倾向性。如果总体比较乐观，其他审稿人和编辑也倾向于修，那么尽量小补实验 + 增加一些思路上的分析。如果总体意见不太乐观，编辑也不太看好本文，那么还是要尽全力补充实验，毕竟补了后发表机会会更大些。

要求你进行新的研究
你可以说：我们同意这么做非常重要，鉴于这次的研究范围和重点/实验条件技术，我们无法实施，我们会在讨论部分提到这部分内容/会以后的研究中进行考虑。还可以找相关的文献（近年发表的、分数稍高于你所投杂志）来说明他们也是这样进行实验的/他们都是这个角度来解释的。
可以使用这些关键词：“follow-up study,” “future research/consideration,” “new direction,” “outside the scope of the study this time,” “We agree …, but we prefer to focus on,”

We would also be interested in the effect on xxx. The data that we have cannot reveal this, but our protocols could be modified for a follow-up study.

We agree that the effect on xxx is an important line of study. We have now acknowledged this and suggested it as a topic for further research in the Discussion section of the revised manuscript (page 12, lines 24–29).

We agree that the effect on xxx would be interesting to know. Our study was designed to focus specifically on xxx this time and we’d like to keep the focus intact, but we have included your point as a consideration for future study (page 15, lines 9–12). Thank you for the suggestion.

[指出困难]There is a number of complications/ It clearly goes beyond the state of the art. （超出了技术水平）, which prevent a further and more detailed analysis of these processes within the scope of this manuscript.

你不同意审稿人对你论文的理解
你可以说：谢谢你提出来的建议，但是我们强调的是…；为了避免误会，我们已经在xxx改写了相关表述
可以使用这些关键词：“clarify”, “ambiguity”, “could be understood in this way,” “Thank you for pointing out the potential for misunderstanding”

Several statements that we made were more ambiguous than intended, and we have adjusted the text to be clearer.

Thank you for pointing out that our statement could be understood in this way. We did not mean that the results apply to all computers but only to single-core computers. We have clarified the explanation in Section 2 to highlight why our results are limited to single-core computers.

Our data do not support the statement that our results apply to all computers at this stage. To avoid potential misunderstanding, we have reworded our hypothesis statement to focus on single-core computers only.

We have reworded the text to state the scope of our research was focused on single-core computers, rather than all computers. Thank you for pointing out the ambiguity of our statement.

We mostly agree. Where we differ is with the idea that there is nothing wrong with the risk factor approach. As we describe in the paper,

第三部分：结束语
注意信的结尾，像 “Since all the corrections have been made, we hope the manuscript will now be accepted without any further changes” 这样的结尾可能会过于自负。

我们可以这么说：“We look forward to hearing from you regarding our submission. We would be glad to respond to any further questions and comments that you may have”，这样的结尾有礼貌也表达了愿意在必要的情况下进行更多修改的意愿。

TIPS：

有的期刊部分文章，如PeerJ(https://peerj.com/reviews/)，nature research的Supplementary information里的Peer Review File都有公开同行评议的过程，大家可以进一步了解审稿人问了什么问题，作者是如何回复的。

最后，务必要检查退还修订论文的截止日期，要在编辑指定的时间内返回修改后的稿件和response letter。一些期刊编辑在给你的信中指出了这一点。如果没有，很可能会错过提交日期。如果在任何阶段你认为无法按照规定的期限提交重新提交，请务必告知期刊编辑。